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Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and How Microserfdom Ate the World (2015)

-up Costs: ‘Silicon Valley,’ ‘Halt and Catch Fire,’ and How Microserfdom Ate the WorldMario Zucca Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs is about the spiritual yearnings and time-frittering activities of youngish coders immersed in the drudgery of the software-development process, and how those activities become an expression of those yearnings. It was published 20 years ago this month, which as far as I’m aware makes it the earliest significant stab by a fiction writer at the Great North American Tech-Company/Start-up Novel.

“I feel like my body is a station wagon in which I drive my brain around,” he writes, “like a suburban mother taking the kids to hockey practice.” There’s a case to be made that this — the disconnect between the mental and the physical as experienced by members of a caste of golden-handcuffed knowledge workers, and the possibility of greater harmony between car and driver, consciousness-wise — is the book’s real subject, rather than Microsoft or “tech” or start-up-house life. The story inside presents Coupland’s anthropological notes on young Microsoft, right down to the snack-food question — when Michael suffers a professional setback and sequesters himself in his office on page two, Daniel and his gym-rat coworker Todd procure flat food (Kraft Singles, fruit leather) to slide under his door. When he chooses to start his own company, Pied Piper, and develop the algorithm with funding from a venture capitalist (the late Christopher Evan Welch) instead of taking a $10 million buyout from his hard-charging Hooli boss, Gavin Belson, he becomes a CEO overnight, and realizes almost as quickly that the job comes with requirements he’s not equipped to handle.

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